slow
The UK artist Ivan Pope is writing about slow art:
“Then I Googled it and found that Grayson Perry had in fact launched a Slow Art movement back in 2005. It doesn’t look like anything much has come of it since, but then that’s the nature of the beast. The Slow Art movement is now well and truly underway, and I’m signing up for it.”
Let’s kill speed, says the Turner prize-winning potter in the first of his new weekly columns.
As a producer of art I feel an increasing pressure to keep in step with our 24/7 culture-on-demand society, and as a consumer I am overwhelmed by a tyranny of choice. I hereby declare the launch of the Slow Art Movement (I have not hired a PR). Artists, I call on you to spend some quality time with a sketchbook before pointing the digital camera out of the car window. Think long and hard, perhaps even discuss your ideas in a Hoxton café before ringing up the fabricator and ordering that monument to a one-liner. Maybe even take the rebellious and increasingly fashionable step of learning how to make something skilfully with your hands.
Picasso set an awesome precedent by knocking out three art works for every day of his life but Vermeer is held in reverence for a surviving oeuvre that wouldn’t crowd out the wall space in a squash court. So I ask gallerists and curators not to expect artists to churn out cool stuff like some cultural ice machine. Often I plan to see a certain exhibition only to find it has been superseded in the blink of an art historian ’s eye by the next show. If we all spent longer thinking, making and looking perhaps less bad art would get made, shown and seen.
simple
Another discussion today reminded me of Ken Friedmans text on fluxus where he lists the twelve fluxus ideas. In particular I was reminded of the notion of simplicity:
Simplicity, sometimes called parsimony, refers to the relationship of truth and beauty. Another term for this concept is elegance. In mathematics or science, an elegant idea is that idea which expresses the fullest possible series of meanings in the most concentrated possible statement. That is the idea of Occam’s Razor, a philosophical tool which states that a theory that accounts for all aspects of a phenomenon with the fewest possible terms will be more likely to be correct than a theory that accounts for the same phenomenon using more (or more complex) terms. From this perspective of philosophical modeling, Copernicus’s model of the solar system is better than Ptolemy’s — must be better — because it accounts for a fuller range of phenomena in fewer terms. Parsimony, the use of frugal, essential means, is related to that concept.
This issue was presented in Higgins’s original list as minimalism, but the term minimalism has come to have a precise meaning in the world of art. While some of the Fluxus artists like La Monte Young can certainly be called minimalists, the intention and the meaning of their minimalism is very different than the minimalism associated with the New York art school of that name. I prefer to think of La Monte as parsimonious. His work is a frugal concentration of idea and meaning that fits his long spiritual pilgrimage, closer to Pandit Pran Nath than to Richard Serra.
Simplicity of means and perfect attention distinguish this concept in the work of the Fluxus artists.
